> An interesting perspective. > > In what sense, would such a state be "stable" though? > -raghu.
Stability, in capitalist terms, is constituted by the pacification of the working class. Other forms of 'instability' harm only individuals -- mostly workers but also _individual_ capitalists. But disaster for individual capitalists (or groups of capitalists) does not constitute any threat to capitalist relations of production. Only a mass movement of workers (such as the '60s offered a premonition of) can endanger capitalism. Mass misery (or mass precariousness) serves ordinarily to "individualize" (fragment) workers, thereby contributing to capitalist stability. The strengthening of repressive machinery, begun under the Johnson & Nixon administrations (wars on crime & drugs) and intensified by every administration since then, can handle marginal surges of resistance. Austerity is stable (stagnant) as former capitalist regimes were not. The result of this "permanent" or endless 'crisis' is the transformation of the "proletariat" into the "Precariat," its powers of resistance suppressed, as Marx saw it could happen. See Chapter 14 of Wages, Price and Profit. Here is the key paragraph: "These few hints will suffice to show that the very development of modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labour more or less to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation. I think I have shown that their struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities. By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement." Carrol _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
